What visitors are currently seeing on Twitter's homepage.
Screenshot by Dan Farber/CNET

Latest update:11:46 a.m. PT

Twitter is officially back up and running, a spokesperson has told CNET.

Today's outage started at around 8:30 a.m. PT. The social network announced the outage on its Status page this morning, saying that "users may be experiencing issues accessing Twitter." The company didn't say what the issue might be, but did say that its "engineers are currently working to resolve the issue."

After about an hour, some users were able to start logging into their Twitter accounts and post tweets. A Twitter spokesperson informed CNET just minutes ago that issue has been resolved, though the person did not say what caused it.

Years ago, as Twitter's growth skyrocketed, the service suffered from frequent outages. Over the last couple of years, however, most of those outages have subsided, save for a few brief outages from time to time.

Twitter suffered an outage last month that left its site unresponsive for about an hour. The company said that the issue was caused by a "cascaded bug in one of our infrastructure components," but provided no further details. Since then, all has been well. Until now.

Twitter isn't the only online service that suffered from an outage today. Google announced earlier this morning that its chat service, Google Talk, was also down, but the problem has been resolved.

We will update this story when we have more information.

Update 9:18 a.m. PT and 10:16 a.m. PT and at 11:46 a.m. PTto include more details.

About the author

Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has covered everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Besides his work with CNET, Don's work has been featured in a variety of other publications including PC World and a host of Ziff-Davis publications.
See full bio